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Nerval's account of the 'orient' is told through such a dreamy haze of ideas that smokey become the boundaries between his recounting of fantastic tales and his own tale of a journey.

The world of story and Nerval's world may be very one and the same place, for his days spent in the Orient are full of owning slaves, smoking hashish and listening to storytellers for the length of entire days. Thus the richness of observation with which a travel biography would otherwise record the details of foreign locations is used instead to capture elaborate and magical worlds.